Last Days (14 page)

Dan had turned the tripod about and filmed the little furtive figure who never broke his intense stare from the earth.

At the copse of trees, Kyle withdrew three bottles of water from his rucksack and handed them out. He drank two-thirds of his own. Lit a cigarette. Smoking, he moved carefully between the trees, their roots choked with nettles and black-berry vines. Every dead brown branch amongst the fallen leaves resembled corroded metal.

When he passed through the copse, he saw the farm.

Small trees partially concealed grey stone walls and slate roof tiles. Four buildings slouched against each other in grass that reached gaping ground-floor windows. The doors and windows were long gone in the biggest structure; the large white farmhouse the adepts had lived in communally.

According to Irvine Levine, the two buildings adjacent to the farmhouse had been used as an artisan’s workshop and 120

LAST DAYS

a temple respectively. There was another agricultural building with a lean-to barn against it, but Kyle couldn’t remember its purpose. Sister Katherine had lived alone in a small
fermette
on its own plot of land somewhere nearby; the only building in the settlement with plumbing and electricity. He couldn’t see the
fermette
, but apparently it wasn’t far.

The reddy-brown building he couldn’t remember the function of was the only structure with timber walls. A few of the vertical planks had fallen into the grass. Tilting inwards from the centre, the roof was concave. The main doors were gone too, but between the upright timbers the inner space was impenetrably dark. As were the interiors of the three stone buildings.

‘Gonna get the whole thing on that new two hundred millimetre lens,’ Dan said. He didn’t like using a zoom, he liked changing lenses.

‘If you must. Thirty-five mil’ will be fine.’

‘This is my David Lean moment, so step down.’

They colour-balanced both cameras and Kyle broke out the Sennheiser mic they used for exteriors. He hadn’t thought to bring a torch, but they had the collection of lights until the portable batteries ran down. ‘Gabriel. See that wooden building, with the lean-to.’

‘Barn. It was a barn.’

‘What did you use it for?’

‘The children.’

‘You put kids in that?’

Gabriel stayed quiet. Kyle let the silence play without further enquiry.

They entered the farm and stood in what must have once been a courtyard before the largest building. The remnants 121

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of an old plough and collapsed cart peeked from out of the long grass like mottled elephant bones.

It was here Kyle became aware of the silence, as he concentrated on framing shots for the best possible composition now he had more to look at than a black and white photograph in Levine’s book. And he found the quiet unnerving, as if it were accompanied by scrutiny. Though it was more than merely the absence of sound and the ominous aura that issues from dilapidation that affected him; there was a profound stillness too.

The air was thick and cool and undisturbed by even a hint of the breeze blowing across the meadow; not a single insect fluttered or buzzed near them, though they had been active in the meadow they came through. But the atmosphere about the farm was not what he would have called peaceful. It was an atmosphere more akin to anticipation.

Gabriel sat in the grass at the edge of the courtyard and peered at the buildings. He looked like a child with an old man’s head.

In between instructions to Dan, who needed little direction on shoots, Kyle began to take exterior shots with his stills camera. Then he set the second camera up near the barn; they always cut between two cameras. One day, he’d love to cut between four.
Dream on
.

They began with the establishing shots. His choice of opening shot in any scene always demonstrated a statement of intent as a director. And it would all be about dilapidation in this case: emptiness, the atmosphere of age, a mood of neglect. A place more dramatically marked than the London house; in his imagination it even began to appear tainted as if by some invisible presence that had once passed 122

LAST DAYS

through, or even resided. He cut the musings dead because it looked like Gabriel was experiencing a similar reverie.

‘You sure you got all the shots you need?’ he asked Dan after an hour.

Dan nodded from behind the first camera. ‘Master shots look good. I got cutaways and will get some decent close-ups now.’

The location didn’t look as if it was going to present any technical problems. Lights would be needed for some of the interiors. The rest of the footage would be composed of stationary interviews, long shots, medium shots and close-ups.

‘I’ll give Max one thing, he knows how to pick a badass location.’

Dan nodded, his face one big grin.

Retrieving his copy of Irvine’s
Last Days
and the script from his rucksack, Kyle opened the book at the plate section and found the scale diagram of the farm. Imagined the place from the air. Opposite the map of the farm, one of the sixteen photos included in the ‘Sensational True Crime Classic’

distracted him. In it, the photographer had captured the farmhouse from where he crouched. In the black and white photograph there were panes of glass in the window frames, and pale wooden doors over the stone thresholds. Before the farmhouse, twelve of the adepts were pictured. A dozen of the twenty-three men and women who remained in the Gathering at that point.

In the photo, the men wore their hair long, and were heavily bearded. Most were smiling. The picture was taken in 1970, but looked as if it had been taken in 1870. They were a strange combination of Dominican monk, Old Testament prophet, and hippy. In the picture, the adepts all wore 123

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the hooded robes that had made them famous on the streets of London, and later in Los Angeles and Yuma.

‘Gabriel.’ Kyle beckoned him over with his head. Taking gentle and light-footed steps, Gabriel moved and stood beside Kyle, who showed him the photograph. Dan looked away from the viewfinder and listened to Kyle; it was all Dan would usually need to get the best shot. ‘I want you to stand over by the main building, where this lot are in the photo.

You don’t have to say a thing. OK. You see this photo?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘We’ll drop in a B-roll slide of this photo, and then you in colour right after. We’ll fade from one into the other, yeah? Then-and-now sort of thing.’

‘How long is this going to take?’

‘That’ll be up to you, I’m afraid.’

The way Gabriel looked at the buildings informed Kyle they would struggle to get the old man inside any of them, unless he suddenly warmed up like Susan White. When Gabriel dragged his feet down to the long white dormitory, Dan whispered, ‘Bottle’s gone.’

Kyle returned his attention to the photo. According to the index, none of The Seven were present. This was the only picture of the farm Max knew of. Irvine Levine had bought it from an ecstatic called Sandy Wallace, aka Sister Juno, now long dead from septicaemia. She had escaped not long before the schism.

Beneath the hems of the ecstatic’s robes, Kyle could see sandaled feet; a symbol of their ascetic lifestyle. Irvine Levine claimed that in France the more attractive female adepts were permanently hooded and veiled around Sister Katherine. She wasn’t keen on competition. But in the photo, the five women in shot were all visible; young and pretty, freckled by the sun, 124

LAST DAYS

their slender shoulders enshrouded by long straight hair. The girls held the leashes of the visible dogs. Sister Katherine’s beloved ‘vargs’; the huskies she adored and brought over from England, and who had always eaten better than the adepts.

Kyle checked the index next to the scale diagram of the farm and saw that the dilapidated wooden building, which he had been unable to remember the purpose of, had ‘Kennel/School’ indicated as its function. ‘Gabriel, when you were here, were the dogs kept in that barn with the children?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘The children born at the farm were put into communal care immediately after birth. The infants were kept in little handmade cribs, though. The older children slept on mattresses,’ Gabriel offered, as if as an excuse.

‘In that terrible building. With the dogs. Jesus,’ Dan said to himself.

Kyle walked into shot and positioned the tie mics on Gabriel.

Kyle had never been interested in art directors; didn’t want places
made
interesting. He’d found by experience, if he looked hard enough in the right way, a location was already perfect for his purposes. They were what they were. As scruffy, downbeat, disused as the places he filmed usually were, those very qualities made them interesting. At least to him, and were often an essential part of the story he was trying to tell. Same with the burned-out cottage he’d filmed in Scotland for
Coven
, and the dreadful graffiti-strewn Oslo tenement he’d shot in
Blood Frenzy
, as if the terrible things that occurred in certain places left them abandoned and 125

ADAM NEVILL

irretrievably dilapidated as a kind of reckoning. And this farm issued more than any dressed-up set ever could.

Kyle peered through a corroded window frame in the long white farmhouse; the old living quarters of the Gathering’s penultimate retreat from the world. Sunlight fell through broken windows and two large door frames in the wall that faced the courtyard, and created a weak brown haze inside.

Broken glass crunched under Dan’s boots when he’d set up the camera for close-ups of the exterior. The windows had been smashed out from the inside.

From his sources, Irvine Levine claimed a terrible storm destroyed the roofs, windows and crops of the settlement at the time of the schism. But then Irvine had never actually been to the farm.

Kyle stepped through the doorway. The unmistakable tang of animal urine made him sniff and wince; it was com-pounded by the fungal scent from the black spores blotching the stone walls. An additional odour of damp wood and perhaps a whiff of stale carrion filled his sinuses.

‘Dan!’

Dan came through the door after him. ‘Creepy.’

‘I want you to get all of this for cutaways. See how it looks with no lights too.’

‘Can do.’

‘This is going to look bitchin’, my friend.’

‘You want to do some lines?’

‘Not yet. Just shoot it and make it look all
Texas Chainsaw
Massacre
. And let’s line up the mics. I want to hear this place’s voice.’

‘Will do my best.’

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‘You always do, mate. Which is why I’d kiss you if you’d bothered to shave this morning.’

Dan snorted. ‘Gabriel won’t come in. I think we’ll have to do his lines outside.’

Kyle rolled his eyes. ‘He could have told us at Wood Green.’

Wheezing with laughter Dan set up for the interior. The ground floor was constructed as a single long room, with a giant fireplace and hearth at one end. The floor was cement, uneven and strewn with detritus, so they were immediately ankle deep in leaf mulch. Scattered firewood, loose bricks, clots of soil and wet plaster appeared within the drifts of dead leaves. The Gathering had eaten every meagre meal inside the room in shifts. Three long wooden beams ran the length of the high ceiling; wooden planks formed the floor of the next storey and were visible between the beams.

‘Dan. Get some close-ups of the hearth.’

About which Dan found two discoloured and dented

cooking pots, the remnants of a broom and a bale of books rotted to pulp.

‘Still here?’ Kyle said, staring in surprise at the dull metal amongst the black leaves. ‘Gabriel!’

Pale and fretful, Gabriel stood beside the hearth, where he once ate a thin gruel concocted from animal feed. Not even this moment of his immortalizing seemed to offer him any comfort; which he must have relished when he accepted Max’s offer and, they had learned from Gabriel on the ferry, a large fee to take part in the film.

‘Battery will be flat by the time he’s done,’ Dan said with a smile.

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Kyle whispered to Dan. ‘A platform. At last, a pulpit from which to preach. But not the one you would have chosen, eh Gabriel?’ Kyle nodded at Gabriel and then slapped the clapperboard shut in front of the lens. ‘Action.’

Brother Gabriel cleared his throat. He swallowed the last of the water inside his bottle when he couldn’t possibly have still been thirsty. The little mouth inside the beard opened.

‘There was no electricity here. We used kerosene lamps. Even our water had to be purchased from the village. We brought it back here in buckets and plastic containers . . . it was tortuous.’ The dry, ironic know-it-all eloquence had gone.

Gabriel’s delivery was staccato, interrupted. The man’s face glistened with sweat.

If that’s how he feels, that’s how I will take it.
The harder his story was to tell, the better the film would be. An intensity Kyle always longed for in interviews was apparent from the man’s first line. Not something he’d anticipated with Gabriel, who he worried would appear too knowing and self-consciously clever on camera. Kyle also now identified sympathy for the old figure.

‘At one time the only thing to eat was eggs from the hens.

Dog food. Oh, and the corn seed we bought in sacks to feed the hens.’

‘You ate dog food and chicken feed?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘Tried to make bread from the seeds. In here. Never worked. Sister Katherine forbade outside food.’

‘What did she eat, Brother Gabriel?’

‘I never saw her eat. She never came in here.’ Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at the wall, as if a door was about to open. Then collected himself.

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‘Allegedly, she ate a rich and varied diet,’ Kyle prompted.

‘Imported treats, down in her cosy, well-lit
fermette
.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘That’s what people were saying at the time. Eventually we grew some small crops of root vegetable and there was orchard fruit, to supplement our diet. Which was rationed. It was pretty miserable.’